Covid 19 coronavirus: Vodafone data outage across NZ causes headaches at vaccination centres

A telco outage has caused headaches at Covid-19 vaccination centres, with those waiting for the jab having to fill out forms manually.

It had slowed the vaccination process, the Ministry of Health said.

"Vodafone has informed the ministry of a nationwide outage which is affecting the digital services at some Covid-19 vaccination centres around the country," the ministry said in its 1pm Covid-19 update press release.

"This means people queuing are having to fill out forms manually, which is adding some time to the process.

"We wish to thank those currently at the vaccination centre for their patience as Vodafone works through this issue."

We are aware of an issue causing intermittent loss of data for some fixed and mobile connections. Our team is urgently investigating this. Our apologies for any inconvenience this has caused.

— Vodafone New Zealand (@vodafoneNZ) May 8, 2021

They were aware of an issue causing intermittent loss of data for some customers on fixed and mobile connections, and were investigating, Vodafone tweeted at 12.14pm.

A Vodafone customer told the Herald they hadn't had access to data since about 9am today.

A Vodafone spokesperson confirmed there had been a "widespread issue" impacting its Vodafone 4G mobile network from about 11am "meaning that for some customers their mobiles were reverting to 3G or their mobile internet browsing was slow or not loading internet pages at all".

"The tech team has been urgently working on a fix and services were progressively restored back to normal between 1.30 and 2.00pm

"We sincerely apologise for any impact and inconvenience it caused to customers during this time."